Uncovering Your
Personal Style

Lincoln Black Label | Immersion Wall Experience

Audience Insight.

Luxury audiences increasingly transcend categorization. Conventional approaches to assign descriptors to this group — terms like socialite, fashionista, enthusiast — ignore the complexity and nuance of the “whole lives” they lead. Brands that mirror and engage with the depth and breadth of their target customers are often seen as far more relevant than those who take a more reductive approach.

Lincoln Black Label speaks to that level of detail, breaking free from the traditional luxury vehicle category to create a personalized experience that exceeds ownership.

Lincoln Black Label and modern luxury buyers are a seemingly perfect match. But without the occasion, never shall the two meet.

Activation Strategy.

Powered by both technology and psychology, Xperience designed a touchscreen wall to connect luxury audiences and Black Label in a deeply immersive and highly emotional interactive engagement.

One part art installation, one part interactive brand journey and fully powered by an intelligence engine, the immersion wall experience uses rich imagery and design elements reflective of Lincoln’s Black Label vehicles to encourage users to discover and visualize their personal sense of style.

Something magical happens when you let guests define their own journey. In the act, they become emotionally engrossed in the narrative they help to create. They internalize it. And then they incorporate what they’ve learned into their own story to be shared later.

The Takeaway.

We didn’t start out by guessing what truly matters to our audience. Instead, we encouraged them to tell us how they see themselves and the world around them, and how they relate to the products they own or seek to acquire. We listened. We learned. And only then could we set them on a journey to fully experience Lincoln Black Label. Sometimes it’s easier to explain it this way: our strategy, creative and technology teams make magic.

Meetings and Events

Collectively we possess hundreds of years of experience — and the turnkey end-to-end production skills required — to produce live events that connect brands and audiences:

Building
Keynotes for
Global Audiences

Panasonic | CES Keynotes

Audience Insight.

The era of the ponderous corporate keynote address in which an executive reads off a teleprompter while meandering aimlessly in front of a PowerPoint slideshow — or even worse, from behind a podium — is long gone. Nowhere is this truer than at the leading edge of global innovation, CES.

Captivating a live audience of 3,000 international media, tech execs and influencers, while simultaneously capturing a virtual audience of millions watching around the world, requires a level of strategic sophistication, creative insight and production expertise that’s light years more advanced.

Activation Strategy.

As the agency of record for Panasonic’s 2008 and 2013 CES Keynotes, Xperience brought all of our skills to bear to deliver its story during both the brightest and the darkest moments in its nearly 100 year history.

Conceived as both a theatrical “State of the Union” carefully choreographed to take our live audience on an immersive journey, and a broadcast-worthy television special that our huge virtual audience would find compelling, each keynote succeeded beyond all expectations.

With new product and technology reveals as the lifeblood of CES keynotes — and frequently including innovations still in the R&D process — the stakes couldn’t be higher. Flawless technical expertise is every bit as essential to our winning formula as creative excellence.

The Takeaway.

Every brand has different metrics for success — both quantitative and qualitative. A few numbers from the 2013 Keynote: 310 million Twitter impressions. Equivalent of $120 million in global media coverage. Live streamed to over 1.3 million viewers worldwide.

But for our friends at Panasonic, it’s the headlines we generated, the ignition of a massive brand transformation, the immediate rise in stock prices, and above all, the outpouring of pride expressed by their 300,000 employees — all of which they attributed directly to our work.

Experiential Marketing

Since our inception in the year 2000, we’ve produced hundreds of experiential marketing tours and brand activations around the world. With a unique focus on automotive brands, our skills include:

Building Authentic
Connections

between customers and brands

Ford | Wanderlust

Audience Insight.

Wanderlust Yoga Studios and Events are aligned around a core mission: to create a community of mindful living while helping individuals find their true north and cultivate their best selves. Authenticity, integrity, presence and respect for the environment are key for this audience.

Building a connection between this audience of eco-conscious women and millennials and a global automotive brand like Ford requires careful calibration — and the ability to not just respect, but truly embody, these core values.

Activation Strategy.

As a strategic alliance partner, Wanderlust attracts Ford’s female growth audience. To bring Ford products to this audience in an authentic and relevant way, Xperience created a custom immersion into Ford’s green initiatives that fit seamlessly into the Wanderlust landscape.

Once we landed on a smart, sustainable design for this nationwide mobile activation tour, we packed our yoga mats and mala beads and hit the road with Ford to build lasting connections with tens of thousands of potential conquest buyers through on-site vehicle interactions, on-site programming and custom digital and social content.

Built around the concepts of sustainability and the power of choice messaging, we introduced this unique audience to the Ford brand in a way that elevated their experience of a life-enhancing event — one where overt marketing would have been wildly out of place.

The Takeaway.

No one expects to see an automaker at an event like this. But those that engaged with the Ford team left pleasantly surprised after hearing its story told in such a deep and meaningful way. In fact, many took away a very different impression of the Ford brand, its products and its commitment to some of the same sustainable practices that brought them to the festival. The Wanderlust partnership will continue to help build customer loyalty and increase favorable opinion and consideration. Great brands do great things. That’s always a story worth telling.

Environmental Design

We’re particularly passionate about designing physical spaces — be they permanent or pop-up — that converge story, spatial design and leading edge media to engage audiences in unique and memorable ways:

Environments
that Enhance the
Audience Experience

Ford | Dallas Cowboys Permanent Installation

Audience Insight.

Activating brands through immersive environmental design can be challenging. Doing so within a spectacular venue built to showcase marquee events? Exponentially more so.

That didn’t stop Ford Motor Company from investing in a substantial presence at one of the most iconic sports venues in the world — the 2.3 million square foot Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

But in a state where football is held in nearly the same esteem as God and country, why would fans possibly pay attention to anything other than the game?

Activation Strategy.

Ford enlisted Xperience to take on the challenge. Though getting noticed in a stadium built for 100,000 fans is no easy feat, we kept our eyes on the prize — the tremendous opportunity the venue provided to bring Ford’s story to life. From the entrance to the field, to the concourse and beyond, Ford was poised to stand out and connect with a massive audience — albeit in a way strategically designed to enhance, rather than distract from, the fan experience.

With this goal in mind, we developed a two-part solution designed to activate across multiple touch points throughout the stadium.

An engaging activity center called the “Cowboys Plaza” was built and placed right outside the main stadium entrance to act as a funnel for fans. Once inside, fans enjoyed games like the “Ford Quarterback Challenge” and the F-150 “Truck Push”. Encircling the “Built Ford Tough” main stage, the entire display buzzed with traffic.

But that was only one piece of the Ford installation.

Xperience designed and executed a massive brand space that included the Ford “Touchdown” Fountain, a giant “Car Wall”, significant column branding, a large Ford oval, and digital sweepstakes kiosks.

Since its launch in 2010, the immersive Ford environment has created millions of positive impressions for the brand, and remains a work of “marketing art” in one of the largest stadiums in the world.

The Takeaway.

For our clients at Ford, their presence at the stadium has resulted in hundreds of thousands of unique registrations, hand raisers, brochure requests, and a level of brand awareness and engagement that’s paid tremendous dividends.

For our agency, this project exemplifies our commitment to building solutions that live at the intersection of story, brand and human. Enhancing the fan experience while simultaneously bringing an iconic American brand to life in three dimensions for millions of people — that’s something we’re very proud of.

Learning and Development

Inspired by neuroscience, organizational sensemaking and a deep commitment to positive change, Learning Xperience Design (LXD) is our own brand of educating that empowers people to become the best versions of themselves. Both a philosophy and process for achieving sustainable learning and performance improvement, some of the key components of LXD include:

Transforming
Culture

one brand at a time

Ford | Consumer Experience Movement

Audience Insight.

Getting the Customer Experience right is not just nice to have for global brands — it’s a matter of survival. Winners are rewarded with increased sales and loyalty. Losers? Well, let’s just say they are quickly cast aside by increasingly more cynical, demanding, and vocal audiences. And with social media as their weapon of choice, word spreads faster than the speed of connectivity.

This is nowhere more true than in the automotive industry, where a broken link in the sales chain might hurt HQ and Wall Street — but can be downright devastating to a Dealer and their employees downstream. Ford realized that they, like many of their competitors, had a serious retail issue that couldn’t be solved by merely implementing new directives and processes. Finding the solution meant going much deeper, and taking on a complete cultural overhaul — one that required a philosophy and plan of action that would stick.

Activation Strategy.

As a leader in learning, development and culture change, Xperience was a natural fit to assist Ford in taking on this tremendous challenge. We realized early on that developing a program of “best practices” wasn’t going to cut it. What Ford needed was not just change — but transformation. The foundation? To imagine and begin building a new consumer experience where, together, engaged employees and engaged customers would result in increased loyalty and profits.

We dug in and got to work creating an internal training program for Ford Motor Company that strengthened the bond between the Ford brand, its Dealers and their employees — including everyone from owners to sales teams to service departments down to the janitorial staff — and rebuilt the Dealer culture at retail from the ground up.

Today, we lead and deploy a small army of change agents committed to CEM around the world, with programs in 375 stores that employ approximately 67 Coaches globally.

The Takeaway.

Creating a world-class customer experience that truly differentiates a global brand like Ford from its competition requires a team of true empathic experts. Over the seven years we’ve run this program for Ford we’ve enlisted the best and brightest thought leaders in this field — a team of rockstars dedicated to creating a global, purpose-driven methodology with the capacity to deliver meaningful and lasting culture transformation . . . one brand at a time.

Creative Services and Strategy

As a “story first” agency, this is the essential foundation upon which we build activations for global brands: